Going to buy it just for the cover.

“The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.”

#NYRBWomen26 I’m making dinner & relistening to this excellent episode of @onebrightbook.bsky.social on LOLLY WILLOWES. If you haven’t listened, highly recommend. onebrightbook.com/2022/06/25/e...

If you're in D.C. a week from tomorrow, there's an event at Politics & Prose honoring the history of Book World. I think the tone will likely be less funerary than you might imagine. I know my comments will be. politics-prose.com/tribute-book...

You may laugh, but the Macbeths are a much better role model for a marriage than Romeo and Juliet. They discuss their problems (killing the king of Scotland), share their hobbies (killing the king of Scotland), and resolve their conflicts (by killing the king of Scotland).

Through the front door today. The Murder Game: Plays, Puzzles & the Golden Age by John Curran. I’ve always enjoyed Golden Age mysteries and am interested in a conversation about their resurgence in this century.

"One of the year’s best books.... Just as James Joyce’s Ulysses is a love letter to Dublin written in exile, so too is Effingers an ode to the [Berlin] of Tergit’s youth...."

What can't Frank Wynne do! We're proud to have some of his work in our archive: wordswithoutborders.org/contributors...

Penelope Fitzgerald reviews Muriel Spark’s Reality and Dreams in the NYT, May 1997.

"It is a sign of a fatally limited imagination to assume that we can only ever desire the pittance to which we are currently reconciled." www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

Becca Rothfeld, a former critic at the Washington Post, on the death of the paper’s books section. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/zmzLbN

Very excited for this one.

Some dedications are just better than others

“Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?” Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“We are very dependent on language to have feelings at all. If you have an impoverished language, you have less emotion. And if you have less emotion, you understand less about your fellow human beings." - Birgitta Trotzig Reading Queen by Birgitta Trotzig, translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel.

Volunteer #librarians from around the world joined forces to build the Nancy Drew collection on Open Library—volunteering their time to organize series, verify editions, untangle authorship, and clean up metadata so anyone can discover these books. Learn more ➡️ blog.openlibrary.org/2026/01/30/a...

Through the mail slot today. The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken.

Fellini and Pasolini’s favourite costume designer was a movie hero in his own right, says the novelist. www.ft.com/content/4b2e...

“My friend, Pasolini says, we are demonstrating that facts are immaterial in fascism, that truth is dead, that meaning is on a permanent migration. I think we are engaged in honorable work.”

To Begin at the Beginning, Javier Marías, 2016. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa.

“This was precisely the sort of idiocy one would expect from someone who wore white patent-leather shoes.”

“She took one of her poodle's charcoal biscuits out of the packet and ate it herself. 'Either these are quite delicious or quite disgusting. Like many things in life, it's rather hard to tell which,' she said.”

“When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it.” ― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

“To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.” ― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The way downhill, into the bottomless incredulity which is despair, was incandescent with flowering chestnut trees.” A perfect sentence, a perfect reflection of Bowen’s work.

🦌We are excited to announce a limited edition of Polly Barton’s debut novel WHAT AM I, A DEER?🦌 This edition is available exclusively through independent bookshops and on our website, with a run of 2,500 copies. Pre-order now: fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/what-a...

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

“Only in our virtues are we original, because virtue is difficult … Vices are general, virtues are particular.” - Iris Murdoch

“Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.” Frank O’Hara

This is awful. John is one of my favorite people in this business, a wonderful writer and a skilled editor who did a great job running a book section that covered more, and more interesting, ground than most. John has forgotten more about books than most people will ever know.

Adam Gopnik said that this novel “is the Trollope novel for people who don’t like Trollope novels.” People who do like Trollope also like the novel for the mildly ascerbic take down of what feels like current political realities. An engrossing novel, a fun conversation.

Through the mail slot today. From @archipelagobooks.bsky.social. Excited for both but will be picking up Queen the instant I finish The Silver Book.

Not long until we drop our thoughts on this guy...

Starting The Silver Book by Olivia Laing. @fsgbooks.bsky.social

Logging on now to chat with @ds228.bsky.social and @ofbooksandbikes.bsky.social about some Trollope.

Don’t miss World in Verse, a free virtual reading today at 11am ET! Readers include Eileen O’Connor, Jackson Watson, Katerina Iliopoulou, @michehut.bsky.social, Nathalie Handal, Nisrine Mbarki Ben Ayad, @samanthaschnee.bsky.social, and Yolanda Castaño. RSVP here: wwborders.live/WorldInVerse2026

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college. William Carlos Williams Seminar A Matter of Taste: Kant’s Critical Aesthetic Existentialism Critical Theory Berlioz Seminar

I’ve started thinking about the International Booker Prize as some of us do this time of year. @stujallen.bsky.social reached out today about getting our annual reading group back together. And I’m looking through a very good eligibility list. www.goodreads.com/list/show/22...

Most grateful for another snow day tomorrow. Although it may be more accurate to call it an ice day because that is what has really sunk us. Not the fluffy stuff. Starting New York Sketches by E. B. White. From the wonderful @mcnallyeditions.com. Not a single disappointment in that line.

Thank you, winter storm.

No school again tomorrow. So I’m gleefully starting a new book. A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews.

That’s snow nearly covering a basement window. I’m not going anywhere. I do have a few books to read.

Now watching.

The Dud Avocado is the most gloriously quotable book I have ever read. Here’s one, out of so many other possibilities. ‘To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit’. Truly words to live by. #BookSky

For fans of absurdity, hijinks, and obsessive novels under 100 pages, galleys of Mark Haber's forthcoming novel, ADA, have arrived! Coming this July, Haber's fourth novel is "an eccentric and visionary work." —Andrea Bajani

Through the mail slot today. So much to love. Especially excited about a US edition of White Nights. @catranslation.org @twolinespress.com @andotherstories.bsky.social

Announcing the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Finalists for the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize!